In this game you explore seemingly connected but disjointed realities interacting with people and your environment to collect items and solve puzzles. If this is weird and doesn’t make a lot of sense, don’t worry, it’s not supposed to! This game is based on the idea of dreams and how sometimes they seem so real and so odd, connecting and juxtoposing things that seem nonsensical.
This game was my submission to the 2023 LSD Jam, inspired by the PS1 game “LCD: Dream Simulator” which was strange and didn’t really have my concrete goals. This game was a fun little project over about three or four months and I had a lot of help from a friend, Michael Guarino. This project served as his first ever project with the Unity game engine, and that made it a fun learning experience for him and teaching experience for me. It was a project where we could just let loose as well, designing the most unhinged gameplay and not worrying about much else.
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This game not requiring any goals made design and development easier in some areas and more difficult in others. We had a lot of freedom, so we had to narrow down to at least a handful of working mechanics we wanted. It’s the standard first person keyboard and mouse movement, some extra controls for jumping, crouching, or using a flashlight. (You can also pee on things, which is funny and some things react, but there was no larger goal for this mechanic beeyond giggles).
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The planned length of the game was supposed to be almost double what it actually ended up being. You make your way through the subway, a dentists office, and a dense forest, but we planned to have this continue on to a mall that served as a hub for entering multiple worlds, collecting items from each area to unlock things and progress to a proper win condition.
I learned that even with 4 months of lead time for a small game, scope is always the hard part. You would think 4 months is a long time for a game jam, and you would be right. But working a full-time job simultaneously, and having someone else learning alongside me, definitely ate that time up. Regardless, this jam was super fun and we love what came out of it. Hope you enjoy getting weird!